


Memory Flashes

by 19thjester



Series: Post Mirror Image [4]
Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Gen, Subtle Sam/Al
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-05
Updated: 2017-02-03
Packaged: 2018-09-21 19:18:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9562877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/19thjester/pseuds/19thjester
Summary: Sam, while in the doldrums with life, goes to New Mexico for Beth's funeral and to help Al deal with things.





	1. Friday morning, Colorado Springs.

7:12 AM. June 25, 2004. Colorado Springs, Colorado. A quiet suburban house. The phone rang once, twice, thrice. Footsteps went from scattered pieces of a bridge and across the room to the study nook. The phone’s display showed a number with a 575 area code. A young woman’s teary voice spoke up on the other end. “Uncle Sam? Can you get down here? Mom’s gone.”

Around the handset of the phone, the knuckles on Sam Beckett’s fingers turned white. “Yes, I can. Are any of your sisters on their way yet?”

“I just called Ruth. She’s arranging for time off. Sharon and Maxine are making other arrangements...” Polly’s voice hitched. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Stay calm. Can you take a deep breath? Through your nose and out your mouth…” Over the phone, Sam heard Al’s youngest daughter follow his instructions. “Good. Listen, I’ll be there as soon as I can, but I need to talk to Donna first. How’s your father handling it?”

“As soon as we came home from the hospital last night, Dad slammed the door and he hasn’t come out of his room yet. I hope he isn’t breaking anything in there.”

“Have you heard anything from him since?” As he talked, Sam looked over the desk in the study nook. There was a stray faculty application, probably placed there by Donna. Sam crumpled it up, intending to throw it in the trash later.

“No. What should I do?”

“How are food supplies? Other things in the house?”

In his mind’s eye, Sam could see the curly cord of the wall phone stretch across the kitchen as Polly walked over to the refrigerator and pantry to check. “Everything looks fine. We had some neighbors drop off food when Mom went into the hospital…” Her voice hitched again.

“Okay, okay. It sounds like you’ll be fine for a while. Your father will deal with things in his own way, but I’ll be there for you if you need me. For bereavement, Ruth should get her leave soon enough.” Sam had heard Al talk about this enough times to know. “She’ll be there soon. Your other sisters will be there soon too. I’ll be there today. Maybe I’ll bring John. I don’t know yet.”

Polly’s voice cheered up at the mention of John. “I can watch him if you need it. I’m sure my sisters can too.”

“I don’t want him to get in the way too much.” Sam glanced over at where his son was looking up, bridge pieces scattered in front of him. “But Donna’s busy with work.”

“Okay. Thank you so much, Uncle Sam.”

“I’ll call again before I leave for the airport.” Sam hung up. He vaguely remembered having to cheer up hysterical young women before, but he couldn’t imagine what Al and Polly were going through. Beth had been going through a rough patch with the cancer as the Project had wound down, and it was partly for her sake that Al had stayed in New Mexico. Now that this ordeal was over, those two had to deal with the aftermath.

“Daddy?” Sam looked down. His son John, not yet six, was standing there, looking like a much more solemn copy of him at that age with Donna’s eyes in his face. He asked, “Who was that?”

“Polly. Do you remember her?”

“Didn’t I play with her before?”

“Yeah, a long time ago, before we moved here. Uncle Al’s having some trouble, and she wants me to come down there. I need to talk to Mommy, ask if you can come too.”

“Can I play with Polly again if I come?”

“Sure.” Sam didn’t want to try to explain what had happened with Beth to his young son, or at least not yet anyway. But he was the one who stayed home and took care of John while Donna worked, so it would be easier for John to come along. He went upstairs to the master bathroom, where Donna was getting ready for work. As he was coming in, she was putting in a pair of gorgeous gold and turquoise earrings.

“Hi, sweetie.” Sam leaned against the doorframe and looked at her. She was so beautiful. How had he gotten-

“Who was on the phone?” she asked, interrupting his reverie.

“Polly.”

Donna inhaled sharply, her hands going down from her ear. “Was it about Beth?”

“She passed away last night. Al’s not taking it well, and neither is Polly. Polly asked me to come down there, help out with arrangements before her sisters arrive. I was thinking I’d take John with me, since you have work today. Is that okay with you?”

“Let me know what day the funeral is so I can come down too. Yes, John can go with you. Will Polly be fine with looking after him?”

“She seemed thrilled when I mentioned him. I’ll let you know about the day for the funeral from Al’s house.”

Half an hour later, done with packing a few days’ worth of clothes for himself and John plus some other things to keep John occupied, Sam drove them to the airport. He picked up a last-minute booking on a flight leaving in an hour for Albuquerque.


	2. Friday afternoon, Alamogordo.

After renting a car along with a booster seat, Sam drove down long desert roads to Al’s white adobe house in Alamogordo, John reading a book in the back seat.

The only cars out front were Beth’s silver Subaru and Al’s black sports car, which had the Star Bright decal in the back window. As Sam approached the house, bag over left shoulder and right hand holding John’s, a flash of memory hit him.

The car now no longer looked like a Corvette. Instead, it looked like a low and sleek bright red Testarossa Ferrari, the blue star still in the back window. Sam came to a halt and squinted. That Ferrari could take those highways at a hundred miles an hour, Al said... But when?

“Daddy?” John said, tugging at his father’s hand, hair falling into his eyes.

Sam blinked, shook his head and squinted at the car. No, that was impossible. Al said a black car was the best, and that red cars were great only if you wanted to get pulled over all the time. Why would he have a red sports car to begin with? “Sorry, the desert heat must be getting to me. Come on.”

As they came closer, the mirage of the red Ferrari dissolved to reveal the aerodynamic black Corvette with the outline of a neon-lit blue star in the back window. Sam shook his head. It really must’ve been a heat mirage, but at this distance…?

Sam knocked at the front door. Polly, eyes reddened and swollen, answered. Her long dark hair was tied back. “Dad still hasn’t left his room. I’ll show you where you two can stay.”

The two followed her through the darkened house. The cool was a relief after the hot June day outside, but Sam wondered why the shades were still drawn. In the guest room, while Polly squatted next to John as he showed her his newest book, Sam unpacked. 

“Is it okay if I go check on your dad?” he asked Polly.

“Sure. I’ll stay here with Johnny.”

Sam walked down the hall to the living room, then around the corner to the basement stairs. He passed two of the girls’ rooms and a bathroom before he came to the door for the master bedroom. Sam put his ear to the door and closed his eyes to take a better listen. There were muffled sobs coming from within.

Sam opened his eyes and he was a young medical resident standing in a hospital ward in Bethesda, Maryland. A curly-haired man in a tattered flight suit was sitting upright in his hospital bed, trying to show a brave face. But his fingernails bit deeply into his palms, and tears streaked his cheeks. The same faint sobbing noises were coming from this man.

“...Polly? Is that you?” the man on the hospital bed asked, and the mirage dissolved to show the master bedroom door.

“No, Al. It’s me. Polly called. Can I come in?”

There was a long sigh. “Yes.”

Sam opened the door a crack. Al was sitting on the side of the bed, his head buried in his hands. His midnight blue short-sleeved shirt was covered with a subtle blue-gray swirling pattern. Of what Sam could see of his curls, they were sticking up all over. Al rubbed at his eyes, then looked up at Sam. Dark circles underlined his darker eyes. “How’s Polly?”

“Upstairs playing with John. She called her sisters too, and they’re making arrangements to fly in.” Sam sat down next to Al and put his arm around his shoulders. “Did Beth make any arrangements before she… passed?” He was hesitant to bring up Al’s least favorite word.

“She had it written down somewhere.” Al flapped a hand in the direction of the nightstand. “I don’t know if I want to look for it right now.” He slumped forward for a moment, reburying his fingers in his hair.

“Okay. Are you sure it’s in her nightstand?”

“Positive. She was talking to me about it but I didn’t want to listen to her about it.”

“All right. I’ll look for you, okay? Why don’t you go upstairs and get some lunch? It is past noon, after all. ”

Al sat up and rubbed at his eyes with a fist, one after the other. “I don’t know if I’m that hungry, Sam.”

“At least come upstairs, say hello to John. You need to walk away from your grief for a bit.” Sam, from vague memory flashes that had come up over the years, knew how much Al could wallow in his grief. With Beth, it was especially painful. He had kept the memory of her strong while barely surviving as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and now his loss of Beth was permanent. A memory flash flickered at this, but Sam pushed it aside. This wasn’t the time.

“And you swear you’ll find… the instructions?”

“I swear. Go on, Al. You look tired and hungry.”

Al nodded, then trudged out of the room. For a moment, another memory overlapped as he left the room- Sam’s voice shouting, “Don’t you dare close that door!” and Al’s hand poised over the handlink. Then the door to the room closed, dissolving another memory he didn’t remember.

Sam had come home almost six years before, right before John was born. Donna had tried asking him about his Leaps, but all Sam could say was that he remembered tiny fleeting moments. If he wanted to pull up the full details of a Leap, he had to ask Ziggy. Now that Ziggy was ensconced in her own CPU unit at home in Colorado, it was a little more difficult to pull the answer out of her. And truth be told, he had no real need to ask Ziggy because he couldn’t remember his leaps that well. It was only in those memory flashes that he saw his leaps and what he assumed were memories from other timelines.

These memory flashes were nothing new to Sam, since he’d had them on and off for the past few years. A station wagon would roll by and he’d have a flash of racing a car. A song would play on the radio and a flash would come up of some dance club with the same song playing in the background. Even while visiting his sister in Hawaii, he’d seen a flash of his family as he’d known them in high school while eating peach cobbler. But this was the first time three flashes had come up so fast. These flashes usually came days apart, not minutes.

Sam made a mental note to himself to ask Al about it and filed it in the far back of his head. Then he searched through the nightstand, looking for any piece of paper that could have Beth’s instructions while ignoring anything else.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Polly was working on getting lunch ready for her father, her father’s godson and herself while the former two were sitting at the kitchen table, catching up.

“Hey, Johnny, can you name all the states? For every one you get right, I’ll give you a cracker.” An open box of Cheez-Its was sitting on the kitchen table.

Like his father had done so often in the past, John squinted at him. “Uncle Al, I’m not a parrot like Polly. And I already learned those when I was four.”

“It’s more for me. Your daddy says I need to eat.” Al popped a cracker into his mouth. “What have you been learning at school?”

“It’s first grade, so not much. I learn more from Daddy. Daddy’s been teaching me how to build bridges this summer with my building sets. Mommy says he’s putting off applying for teaching positions again.”

Al laughed. Just then, Sam came in, a folded piece of paper in his hand. 

Sam said, “John, please don’t repeat what Mommy says. Al, I think I found it. Do you want me to read it to you?”

Al dug in his pocket, then stopped, grimacing with his eyes screwed shut. He shook his head and then made a “go on” motion.

Sam unfolded the paper then scanned it. “Good news. She’s already got everything set up, Al. It says all you have to do is call these places, tell them everything is ready to go for Beth, then they’ll help us with scheduling a day for the funeral, within the next three days or so.”

Al fished his reading glasses out, balanced them on the end of his nose, then looked over Sam’s arm at the paper. On Al’s face, Sam saw the Admiral sauntering in to take over the situation. “Funeral parlor first, the cemetery second, and catering third. Polly, did you get that?” Al reached for the paper.

“Why are you making her do this for her own mother's funeral?” Sam snatched the paper away. “Here, I’ll do it.” He still remembered picking up the phone in his graduate housing’s common room at the age of twenty, not much older than Polly was now. He remembered hearing the tears in his brother's voice as Tom begged him to come home for the funeral, that he had to make all the arrangements by himself since their mother couldn't handle it.

Back in New Mexico, Polly whispered, “Thank you.”


	3. Saturday afternoon, Alamogordo.

The next morning, as promised, Sam took care of the calls. He couldn’t believe Al would do that, but then again, that was his naval officer side kicking in: automatically delegate duties to someone in your company, and family counted as his company. Right now, Al wasn’t in too good shape, emotionally, so it was a good thing he had his best friend here to cancel out his worse decisions.

Al’s other three daughters, all dark-haired, arrived within the next day. Sharon, who had brought her husband, elected to stay in a hotel. Ruth and her husband chose to stay in her old room at Al’s house, as did Maxine.

Al had brought up one of his old engineering books from the depths of the basement for John. Now they were poring over various diagrams of bridges as the four sisters discussed the next day's funeral.

“Shouldn't you be in there with them, Al?” Sam said, watching them discuss a diagram. 

Al looked up, face pinched. “I’m sorry, Sam. I know I should be. But it's too much right now.” He looked over to the living room, where Polly was talking about her misadventures in the education program at her school. “You know, it is nice having my girls back under the same roof.”

“You always did like being surrounded by beautiful women,” Sam’s chin dipped down and his eyebrows went up in that way they always did whenever he wanted to give Al a hard time about something.

Al instead took it at face value, the smile lines bracketing his mouth. “Yeah, I always did.” The lines vanished as he looked back down at the book. “It's too bad the most beautiful of them all isn't here.”

“Al.” Sam laid his hand on the table, extending it towards his best friend. But Al was already looking away, answering another of John’s questions about bridge design.

“Do we have anything that we can use for cables at home, Daddy?” John asked. “I wanna make the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“We can look through your kit,” Sam said. “Or we could improvise something. We could go to Michaels, see what they have.”

“But you have to be very careful while building a cable bridge. There's this one nasty video they showed us in all my classes at Annapolis,” Al said to John, his eyes widening. “You have to think about the wind, how it's going to affect your bridge. Let me see if I can find that video for you…” They departed for the computer in Al’s office, leaving Sam to join the girls in the living room.

The topic had turned to Beth now. Ruth said, “Hello, Uncle Sam,” and scooted over to make room for him. Sam smiled and sat down. The husbands were standing near the back of the room, talking about golf. Sam wondered why Al didn’t join in with their conversation instead of talking about bridges with his godson.

Sharon, Maxine and Polly also greeted Sam with “Uncle Sam, hi!” They talked about how their families were doing.

Then Ruth, who had been quiet, said, “Did Mom ever tell any of you about her angel?”

“Angel?” Sharon shook her head, and so did her sisters. “What angel?”

“She told me only once, when I was little. Then Dad got mad at her and told her not to tell their kids about that nonsense.”

“Why would an angel be nonsense?” Sam frowned. “That doesn’t sound like Al.”

“He was mad about church and God and things like that after coming home, Mom told me. He got better about that by the time you two met, Uncle Sam. Sharon, you would’ve been about three, so you don’t remember me telling you about this the first time. Maxine was a baby and Polly wasn’t born yet.

“Mom said this was while Dad was stuck in Vietnam. She was feeling very upset one day, because she thought that Dad was already dead over there. She’d met some guy and she was trying to decide if she should move on or not. Then, one night, when she’s crying to her and Dad’s song- you know what I’m talking about, right?”

Polly filled in, “Georgia on my Mind.”

“Yes. Mom had put a record of that on and she was upset and crying and thinking about Dad. Then all of a sudden, this guy in white shows up. She thought he was some burglar breaking into her house at first, but he told her he was a friend of Dad’s. He told her that Dad was alive and coming home.”

The hairs on the back of Sam’s neck went up. Why did this feel so familiar? He could even hear the record playing… 

A memory started to fade into Sam’s vision, but it faded out at the sound of Ruth’s voice. “She had no idea who this guy was, since he disappeared so quickly. But she called him her angel.”

Sharon glanced at Sam, then said to Ruth, “Do you remember the first time Dad brought Uncle Sam over for dinner? They were working on that star project…”

“Star Bright,” Sam said. “You were about five or six then, weren’t you? I remember you and Ruth practically dragged me to your room to play with your dolls.”

“Dad told us to do that, to distract you. Mom took a look at you and ran to her room. She said something about an angel and I always wondered why. She got over it later on…”

“...and she was always very sweet on me. I remember Al complaining to me about her telling him to bring me over for dinner every week. He didn’t want to pester me too much, since I was a ‘damned genius stuck in his own work’”- here, Sam’s voice dropped into a gravelly imitation of Al’s, and Al’s daughters laughed, having heard this so many times growing up- “but I was grateful to her for it.”

“That first night you came over for dinner, she said you looked like her angel, Sam.” All of his daughters looked towards their father’s voice. Al was now standing in the entranceway to the living room, John next to him. “That’s why she fussed over you so much, encouraged me to get close to you. She thought the angel had somehow sent you our way. When you started Leaping, we couldn’t tell anyone outside of the project that it was about time travel. Thanks to her angel, she put two and two together and asked me if you were traveling in time.”

“But I don’t remember seeing her on Leaps. I told you, Al, I don’t remember much from that time.” Sam tried to think back, to bring back the memory flash. 

Al squinted. “Are you sure? Remember last fall, when I came up to visit and we were walking downtown with John? We passed those kids using sign language and you got this… weird glazed-over look in your eyes. Then you shook it off, said it was nothing. I told you I thought it was something and I still think it is. What is goin’ on in that head of yours, Sam?”

Everyone in the room was staring at Sam now, wearing concerned looks on their faces.

John spoke up. “He gets those all the time. Mommy says it’s because he’s remembering things that happened in a different world.”

“Different world?” Al repeated.

As John tried to recall his mother’s explanation of leaping and quantum states, Sam got up and left. He walked out of the house onto the front porch. He was about to sit down in one of the wicker chairs out there when Al’s damned convertible caught his eye, winking from black to red and back to black. Sam shook his head and then walked around the west side of the house, away from the living room windows, to the back porch.

Al was already there, cigar in hand. “Want to talk about it, Sam?” He inhaled from it then let out a plume of smoke.

“Sorry. I didn’t know how to explain it to anyone. I told Donna once because she caught me in that trance you mentioned. I think she figured it out for herself.”

“How long have you been having these… trances?”

“I call them memory flashes. Since John was about two, I think. I sort of remember a few flashes before that, but they weren’t too clear. How much do you remember from my Leaps, Al?”

“Too much. After you came home, it took me a while to sort through everything. I’ve tried to forget a lot, but it’s hard. I remember a time when Beth didn’t wait for me and I also remember other times. What kind of things you been seein’ with those flashes?” Al squinted one eye at Sam, cocking his head.

“You know your car out front?”

“Sure, the Corvette. What about it?”

“When John and I were walking up here yesterday from the car, I got a memory flash when I saw that car. It looked like a red ‘80s Ferrari. How about that?”

Al squinted at him through the cigar smoke. “Sam, that’s crazy. First of all, a Ferrari? I paid for two college educations and I’m working on paying off a third. I get good pay for my rank, but not that good. Second, did I ever tell you the story of why I don’t drive red cars anymore?”

“Right, you were driving Beth to the hospital in your old red car and you kept getting pulled over. I remember that. But I’m telling you that at some point, maybe before I started Leaping, you drove a red Testarossa Ferrari convertible.”

“That’s specific.” Al’s eyes narrowed further. “I thought you weren’t much of a car guy, Sam?”

“No, I’m not. But I remember that specific model because you pointed it out to me before.” The circa-1987 memory surfaced in Sam’s head. “Beth needed a girls’ day off, so you rounded me up to help you out with the girls and we went to some car show. Even I could tell the girls were getting bored, but you would not shut up. They had some experimental model out on the floor that you were really going gaga over. That model is what I saw yesterday morning, in bright red, with the Star Bright decal in the back window.”

Al tilted his head back to stare at the deep blue summer sky, lost in thought. Then he looked back at Sam. “I had that car? Really?” He was almost smiling, almost envious of himself in that other timeline. Then he said, “Why couldn’t you talk to me about it, Sam? I saw almost everything you did while you were out, trying to right every wrong. I could have helped you with some of those memory flashes.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to tempt fate.”

“Sam, what are you talking about? The government took apart the Acceleration Chamber, the Imaging Chamber, everything. You’re lucky they let you keep Ziggy. You couldn’t go back in time now if you tried.”

Sam sat down on a bench, head in his hands. “No, I wanted it that way. But I miss being thrown into unpredictable situations every day, helping out people. Who’s to say I couldn’t scrape together the funding for another project?”

“And now that John’s in school, you’re missing all those unpredictable situations.” Al sat down next to him and slung an arm across Sam’s shoulders. “I get it.”

“You do?”

“Sure. When I was in ‘Nam, we never knew what Charlie had planned for us that day. Would we be marching through the jungle? Would they beat us? We never knew. We had to expect the unexpected and live for it. I went through it for six years, and you went through it for, what was it, three years?”

“Seven,” Sam said quietly.

“...seven? What do you mean, seven?” Al’s dark eyes widened, meeting his descending bushy eyebrows. “You leapt in ‘95, didn’t you? Then you came home in ‘98…”

“I haven’t told this to anyone, not even Donna. But I came home after what I guessed was seven years’ worth of of leaping because I wanted a better future. That meant taking myself out of the equation and coming home to my family.”

“Six, seven.” Al shrugged. “Not that far off from me. So, what, you’re fifty-four now, not fifty?”

Sam cracked a smile at this. “Going on fifty-five. Late to be dealing with a five-year-old.”

“I wasn’t far off from that when I was dealing with Polly at that age. It gets better, Sam, much better. At least you don’t have to worry about your kid coming home knocked up.”

“Good point.”

“Anyway, you went through seven years of dealing with all these unexpected situations and dealing with them as only Dr. Samuel Beckett can. Then you had to deal with more unexpected situations through Johnny. Now that he’s in school, what are you up to? Last I heard, you tried teaching. Why didn’t you come back for the spring semester? You didn’t like it?”

“Donna can also tell you how that went.” It had been a semester of equal parts unrelenting boredom with the work and dealing with people who had been following his previous work for years. It wasn’t an experience Sam wanted to repeat.

“Maybe you weren’t in the right class. Wasn’t it some freshman class?”

“I wanted to ease in, see how I liked it.”

Al shook his head and took a puff of his cigar. “Take it from me, your good old buddy, and I mean old: you are Sam Beckett, and that means you can’t ease into things. You have to dive in. Why don’t you look for something in any of your degrees? Not just physics. Anything.” He tapped Sam’s head. “You have to get that genius noggin of yours back into gear. This won’t be anything like Project Quantum Leap. Nothing will. But you can still make a difference like before. You can right your students’ wrongs by teaching them about the wonders of the world.”

“I’m sure Beth would have known what to say- ohhhh. I’m so sorry, Al, I didn’t mean to mention her.”

Al rubbed at one of his eyes. “It’s okay, Sam. We talked about you all the time, did you know that?”

“No.” Sam had to smile. “What did you talk about?”

“Oh, you know, me, Donna, Beth, we’d have these weekly dinners like what we had before you Leaped. I’d talk about you and how you were doing on the latest Leap. Then Donna and Beth would throw in advice or their concerns about you. That mental hospital leap was very hard on all of us, let me tell you, whew. They helped me out on a few other Leaps too, for ideas on what you should do next.”

“And to think I almost didn’t deserve Donna.”

“Sam! Why on earth would you think that? You two are perfect for each other! She understood why you couldn’t remember her. I couldn’t have as much patience as Donna did during those years you were away, and especially with you not being able to remember me- I mean her.”

“I’ve gotten a few memory flashes of the time she left me.”

“That was because of her personal issues. You helped solve those on another Leap, Sammy. You’re the one who brought her back into your life. You should be happy with her.”

“Do you ever wonder, Al?”

“Wonder? What, like if I hadn’t ended up with Beth? I have the memories of that.”

“I don’t, Al. I’m wondering what it would’ve been like if I hadn’t ended up with Donna.”

Al fiddled with his Annapolis ring. “I-I don’t know, Sam. Come on, let’s head back. I’m sure Johnny’s wondering if his daddy’s okay.”

“I’m fine.” Sam turned to go back inside.


	4. Saturday evening, Alamogordo.

At a restaurant that night, the girls were discussing what they would say at Beth’s funeral the next afternoon. Polly had explained it to John, who didn’t seem too bothered since he didn’t remember her that well. 

Sam glanced over at Al, who was picking at his food. “Come on, Al, I thought you liked green chile,” Sam said. “Are you still thinking about her?”

“We had over forty years together,” Al whispered to his plate. “How could I not?”

“You’re not going through this alone, Al.” Sam reached out his hand for Al, laying it on the table. “You’ve got me.”

Al had to smile as he laid his hand down so that it was fingertip-to-fingertip with Sam’s.

John, following his father’s lead, also put his hand down. “And you’ve got me!”

Ruth, Sharon, Maxine and Polly all followed their lead too, as did Al’s sons-in-law.

Ruth said, “See, Dad? You’ve got a lot of support going forward. You’ll be fine.”

Al, who had by now moved his hand an inch back, had to smile, tears coming to his eyes. “Thank you. I know, it’s hard, not having Mom here, but having you all here makes it easier.”

“We’re always here for you, Al,” Sam said. “Especially me. We’re good old buddies, aren’t we?”

***

That night, before they went off to bed, Ruth, Maxine and Polly were talking. Sam was still awake, as was Al, who claimed he couldn’t sleep. Despite this, he was leaning against Sam in the entranceway to the living room.

Maxine said, “Everyone’s going to say something at the funeral tomorrow, right?”

Al said, his voice more gravelly than usual with exhaustion, “I don’t know if I can.”

“Hey, Al, you know I can help you, right?” Sam said, smiling a little. “I can be here for you for once.”

“Right, I’ve always got you.”

Ruth, curled up on the couch, said, “Mom always talked about how much she envied how close you are with Uncle Sam, Dad. You’ll be fine tomorrow.”

Al backed away from Sam, wobbling over to the other side of the entranceway and leaning on the opposite side instead. “Yes, I have him. I’ll be fine.” He crossed his arms and watched his daughters talk, the faint smile lines coming back to his face.

Soon, the girls, deciding it was time for bed, departed for their rooms.

“Will you be all right, Al?” Sam asked.

Al looked down, arms still crossed. “I… don’t know. I’ll need some time to myself after this whole funeral business is over, be away from everyone for a while.”

“Want to have Polly come visit Colorado for a while? Give you more space.”

“That’d be great, Sam.” Al’s arms dropped to his sides and his eyes twinkled. “Maybe she can help you with your faculty applications.”

“Aww, Al, I dunno… isn’t it a bit late by now?”

“You have a Nobel Prize to your name. At the damn least, you can get your foot in the door somewhere. You need to do something with your life, Sam, not just mope around feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Same goes for you, Al. Remember, we’re all here for you. And I’ll make sure everyone gives you some space.”

“Aw gee, Sammy, thanks.” Al rubbed at his eye.

“C’mere, you.” Sam held out his arms for a hug, and Al embraced him, holding him tightly.

When they let go, Sam said, “Love ya, Al.”

“Love ya too, Sammy.” Al let out a long sigh. “I’ll see you in the morning?”

“Yeah. Whatever happens tomorrow, you got me.”

“And for the rest of my life too?”

“For the rest of our lives, absolutely.”


End file.
